An extremist, not a fanatic

October 03, 2013

Marxism, freedom & the Cold War

Ben Brogan's claim that Ralph Miliband was on the wrong side of "the struggle between freedom and communism" has been rebutted by Norm. There's more to add.

First, the attempt by the right - we can add Douglas Murray - to identify Marxists with Soviet apologists is very silly. There's a big strand within Marxism of libertarianism and even anarchism, which loathed the Soviet Union. For example, with the space of a few pages, Trotsky describes Stalinism as "vileness", "degeneration", "moral decay", "barbarism" and "lagging behind a cultured capitalism". In the Marxian circles I moved in in the early 80s, the debate wasn't about the merits of the Soviet Union, but rather about how best to describe its many inadequacies.

Secondly, let's ask: what sort of freedom did the pro-capitalist opponents of the Soviet Union in the mid-20th century believe in?

It certainly wasn't freedom for homosexuals, who suffered brutalrepression. Nor was it freedom for young men. The slavery that was National Service did not end until 1963 - and some died during this time. Nor was there freedom for women; tough divorce laws and the legality of marital rape violated the basic principle of self-ownership. Nor was there free speech; not only did we have repressive libel laws, but also theatre censorship until 1968. Nor even was there some of the economic freedoms which today we take for granted; even the Tory governments of 1951-64 had exchange controls, laws against Sunday trading, more central planning than we have now, and public ownership of many of the commanding heights. Remember, Hayek dedicated the Road to Serfdom to "socialists of all parties", who ignored him for 30 years.

Now, I'm not claiming here any moral equivalence between Stalinism and Conservatism. Instead, I'm making two points.

First, it is just plain stupid to pretend that the Cold War was a fight between Marxism and freedom. Many Marxists supported freedom and opposed the USSR, and many conservative Cold Warriors were enemies of freedom.

Secondly, it's not just Communists who had some evil ideas in the mid-20th century.

So, here's my offer to Ben Brogan and Douglas Murray. If you stop pretending that all Marxists are opposed to freedom, I'll not accuse Tories of murdering Alan Turing.

Conservative MPs today up and down the country, despite their free-market rhetoric oppose development of land by their owners, regardless of impact on others. Our wasted use of this resource is no better than the Soviet Union's wastage on potatoes.

And they support our system for deciding Head of State, despite it being closer to Cuba and North Korea than most countries in Europe or the western world.

Certainly it's absurd to identify Marxists as Soviet apologists. But isn't it equally absurd to identify opponents of the Soviet Union in the mid-20th century as anti-gay, anti-women, and anti-free speech? As for the suggestion that National Service was a form of slavery - well, I'm speechless.

As for the suggestion that National Service was a form of slavery - well, I'm speechless.

Well, it only differed from slavery in that people got a wage as well as food and board. So, I guess that's closer to serfdom.

And a Conservative MP Philip Hollobone wants to bring it back in order to "inspire young people with self-respect, personal reliance, discipline and behavior", which isn't a million miles away from what the Leninist Young Communist League preached in the USSR. But to be fair, even that was voluntary.

You can't argue "I'm right because my opponents aren't perfect." Marxists are enemies of freedom more often than not. Sure, capitalists in the 60's weren't great on the whole gay rights thing, but Marxists murdered everyone they could get their hands on every time they gained power.

Just a back-of-hand calculation. SU and China are acknowledged to have killed what, e.g. 40 to 50 million? The other three didn't come close. Assuming gays are about evenly distributed across the population in all regions involved, SU and China killed more. Let's throw in Franco. Still more.

The thing is, the Nazis did not pick gays at random, according to their prevalence in the general population. They deliberately targeted male and female gays for extermination (together with other "undesirables").

As a curious thing, the Nazis even had a concentration camp uniform system, where gays were identified with a pink triangular badge (Jews, for instance, had a yellow triangle; communists, socialists and social democrats, a red one, and so on):

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